The GSMA today announced Flowit as the winner of the "Smarter App Challenge" developer competition at the Mobile Asia Expo. 

SHANGHAI, June 20, 2012 -- This challenge called on all developers to submit their commercially available mobile apps, on any platform, that meet the growing market need for greater efficiency as defined in the GSMA Smarter Apps for Smarter Phones guidelines launched at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year. As the grand prize winner, Flowit will receive $10,000, with each runner up receiving $2,000 and all three received a trip to this year's Mobile Asia Expo in Shanghai for the final round of judging.

"There were some incredibly original and inspired apps submitted for the Smarter App Challenges and Flowit truly represents the most creative and innovative developer minds," said Michael O'Hara, chief marketing officer, GSMA. "The GSMA is working with developers to ensure that their applications are more user and network-friendly. This developers' competition will drive the development of efficient mobile applications that have improved connectivity, data and power consumption and security. In turn this leads to an improved user experience that helps to create and maintain app popularity."

The three finalists for the Challenge were

• 'Flowit' - a photo magazine application where members can post, share and view amazing pictures of their favourite local restaurants - Mr. Jun-Ho Choi, aFactory, South Korea.
• 'Metrowizard' - a Navigation App using Location-Based Services (LBS) for the Seoul subway system is the world's first - Mr. Kyung Hum Kang, Merlin, South Korea;
• 'New Dance Tracks' - a Music Aggregator that retrieves data remotely from APIs of three online music stores - Mr. Marco Valent, Dedicado, the Netherlands.

Flowit was chosen particularly for its ability to provide rich functionality including sharing user generated images but also making optimum use of network resources and importantly having minimal impact on battery life. Flowit can also reduce data traffic by using compressed XML, image caching, thumbnail generation on the client and lazy image loading and adaptive image resolution depending on the connected network (mobile or Wi-Fi). It reduced the amount of XML data traffic by more than 70 per cent by compressing the data and removed the transmission of thumbnail data by creating it with the original image on the client. All the images are cached and lazily loaded and the image resolution is determined by the connected network.

The judges for the Smarter App Challenge were Alex Sinclair, chief technology officer, GSMA, Dr. Terry Ahn, executive vice president, KT, and Olli Andersson, head of Smart Lab, Nokia Siemens Networks. For full criteria, eligibility and other information, please visit: www.mobileappchallenge.com/smarterapp.

Improving Mobile App Efficiency
Consumer demand for innovative smartphone applications has grown dramatically over the past few years and this high demand for and heavy use of mobile applications has resulted in a greatly increased signalling load at the network level, compared with a relatively low amount of data traffic. A driver behind this increased signalling load is the proliferation of "network-unfriendly" applications that are not optimised for mobile networks; mobile networks have their own specific requirements and constraints, and applications written for fixed networks may not necessarily perform well in the mobile world.   

The GSMA released a set of recommendations for application developers at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year that will enable improvements across a number of areas including application connectivity, power consumption, network reliability and security. By following the guidelines, developers will be better equipped to create fit-for-purpose apps; mobile operators will see a reduced strain on their networks; and users will experience more responsive and reliable apps and improved battery life. For a copy of these guidelines, please visit http://www.gsma.com/smarterapp.

About the GSMA

The GSMA represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide. Spanning more than 220 countries, the GSMA unites nearly 800 of the world's mobile operators, as well as more than 200 companies in the broader mobile ecosystem, including handset makers, software companies, equipment providers, Internet companies, and media and entertainment organisations. The GSMA also produces industry-leading events such as the Mobile World Congress and Mobile Asia Expo. 

For more information, please visit the GSMA corporate website at www.gsma.com or Mobile World Live, the online portal for the mobile communications industry, at www.mobileworldlive.com